Name Sheila Black | Role Poet | |
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Books House of Bone, Santa's Christmas storybook, Will the real Ms X please re, Sitting Bull and the Battle of t, The little snowman | ||
Sheila black my mission is to surprise delight
Sheila Black, an American poet, has written over 40 books for children and young adults as well as four poetry collections. She was a 2000: U.S. co-winner of the Frost-Pellicer Frontera Prize, and a 2012 Witter Bynner Fellowship.
Contents
- Sheila black my mission is to surprise delight
- Sheila black devotion singin in the rain toppop
- Life
- Confessional Poetry
- Reviews
- Her Works
- References
Sheila black devotion singin in the rain toppop
Life
She graduated from Barnard College and received her master's degree from the University of Montana. . Teaching part-time at New Mexico State University and also working as Development Director for the Colonias Development Council, Sheila Black continues to write poetry, recently becoming co-editor of Beauty Is A Verb: The New Poetry of Disability with Jennifer Bartlett and Mike Northen. Sheila Black was diagnosed with XLH, commonly referred to as Vitamin-D Resistant Rickets, at a young age. Black continues to advocate for equal rights for persons with disabilities. She has three children, a 22-year-old daughter, a 17-year-old son, and a 15-year-old daughter. She lives with her younger daughter, son, and husband.
Confessional Poetry
In her poems, Sheila Black writes in a confessional style, often referencing past conflicts that resulted from her diagnosis of XLH, such as in her poem What You Mourn. According to Sheila Black,
Reviews
Sheila Black's poems are heavy and yet porous, racing toward transcendence and then slowing down to whisper a telling detail
Perhaps the broad message of Love/Iraq can be understood simply by taking its title at face value. There is a borderline—a slash—between two wholly different states (one a political state, the other a state of being). The concept can be viewed as a face in stark relief, with one half shadowed black and the other white: the yin and the yang. It’s this balance that characterizes the experience of reading Love/Iraq, as the collection offers a narrative circularity, along with the seamless interweaving of the ethereal and the concrete. Sheila Black’s poems are heavy yet porous, racing toward transcendence then slowing down to convey a telling detail.
In How to Be a Maquiladora, Sheila Black demonstrated her gift for using details to create images that evoke the life and environment of a specific locale. In House of Bone, her first major collection of poetry, Black paints with a much broader stroke. Not only does House of Bone, cover a much wider range of topics and experiences, but the particularities that she describe also seem to begrudgingly conceal the universal in the particular. This collection is also a much more personal book. While individual poems in Maquiladora, such as "Desert Life," remind the reader that the poet was no mere observer but a part of that environment about which she wrote, in House of Bone, Black's own experiences provide the grist for the poems.